Double-take: Unpacking the play in the image-nuclear news story

Abstract

This paper explores the complex cultural and institutional practice of ‘playing’ and ‘bonding’ with the reader in the Australian print-media, as exemplified through a new news story genre in The Sydney Morning Herald, where events are presented as short, witty news stories with a heading, a dominant photograph and a caption. This is termed the image-nuclear news story. In these stories the heading and image enter into a verbal-visual play that relies on the manipulation of common (often idiomatic) expressions, while the caption elaborates on the story’s news value. Through this play newspapers construe a particular kind of reader, who fulfils certain expectations as far as different types of knowledge (linguistic, cultural, semiotic) are concerned. To analyze the intertextual and multisemiotic play and its interpretation by readers, this article makes use of corpus linguistic methodology and theory, in particular compositional (‘open-choice’) and non-compositional (‘idiom’) principles of interpretation. The analyses show how readers’ linguistic experience enables them to unpack the play in the image-nuclear news story, allowing them to ‘bond’ with the newspaper, and be part of the linguistic and cultural (reading) community construed by this news story genre. As newspaper circulation is falling, creating solidarity with the reader in the hope of maintaining their loyalty is essential to the survival of newspapers, and, arguably, getting them to participate in multisemiotic play is one way of doing so.